He composed elegiac couplets that criticised his society's traditional values of wealth, excesses, and athletic victories.

The ancient biographer Diogenes Laertius reports that Xenophanes was born in Colophon, a city that once existed in Ionia, in present-day Turkey.

[5] According to Diogenes Laertius,[g] Xenophanes wrote a poem on the foundation of Colophon and Elea, which ran to approximately 2000 lines.

To judge from these later accounts,[h] his elegiac and iambic poetry criticized and satirized a wide range of ideas, including Homer and Hesiod,[8] the belief in the pantheon of anthropomorphic gods and the Greeks' veneration of athleticism.

[9] He composed natural explanations for phenomena such as the formation of clouds and rainbows rather than myths,[9] satirizing traditional religious views of his time as human projections.

[10] As an early thinker in epistemology, he drew distinctions between the ideas of knowledge and belief as opposed to truth, which he believed was only possible for the gods.

[9] Xenophanes wrote a number of elegiac poems on proper conduct at a symposium,[9] the Ancient Greek drinking parties that were held to commemorate athletic or poetic victories, or to welcome young men into aristocratic society.

The surviving fragments stress the importance of piety and honor to the gods,[j] and they discourage drunkenness[k] and intemperance, endorsing moderation and criticism of luxury and excess.

[m][9] Orphism and Pythagorean philosophy introduced into the Greek spirituality the notions of guilt and pureness, causing a dichotomic belief between the divine soul and the mortal body.

[11] God moves all things, but he is thought to be immobile, characterized by oneness[n][12] and unicity, eternity,[o] and a spiritual nature which is bodiless and is not anthropomorphic.

[13] Xenophanes' understanding of divine nature as separate and uninvolved in human affairs motivated him to come up with naturalistic explanations for physical phenomena.

[9] Xenophanes was likely the first philosopher to come up with an explanation for the manifestation of St. Elmo's fire that appears on the masts of ships when they pass through clouds during a thunderstorm.

Although the actual phenomenon behind St. Elmo's fire would not be understood until the discovery of static electricity in the modern era, Xenophanes' explanation, which attempted to explain the glow as being caused by agitations of small droplets of clouds was unique in the ancient world.

[15] Xenophanes concluded from his examination of fossils of sea creatures that were found above land[s] that water once must have covered all of the Earth's surface.

[16] He used this evidence to conclude that the arche or cosmic principle of the universe was a tide flowing in and out between wet and dry, or earth (γῆ) and water (ὕδωρ).

[17] The idea of alternating states and human life perishing and coming back suggests he believed in the principle of causation, another distinguishing step that Xenophanes takes away from Ancient philosophical traditions to ones based more on scientific observation.

[16] Xenophanes's influence has been interpreted variously as "the founder of epistemology, a poet and rhapsode and not a philosopher at all, the first skeptic, the first empiricist, a rationalist theologian, a reformer of religion, and more besides.

However, modern scholars generally believe that there is little historical or philosophical justification for these associations between Pythagoras, Xenophanes, and Parmenides as is oft alleged in succession of the so-called "Italian school".

[21] In his ninety-second year he was still, we have seen, leading a wandering life, which is hardly consistent with the statement that he settled at Elea and founded a school there, especially if we are to think of him as spending his last days at Hieron's court.

[ab] The thought of Xenophanes was summarized as monolatrous and pantheistic by the ancient doxographies of Aristotle, Cicero, Diogenes Laertius, Sextus Empiricus, and Plutarch.